Pac Man Hands-On

Microsoft talks about Xbox Live Arcade as a place for casual games and coin-op classics, which is yet another great reason to buy the system. While these smaller games might not push the hardware for graphics and long-term playability, they provide solid value at a low price.

That value is about to go higher with the forthcoming inclusion of the original Pac-Man for only 400 Microsoft Points (about $5 U.S.).

The Xbox Live Arcade version, which comes in at about 16MB of storage space, perfectly matches the 1980 arcade release. Instead of remapping the game to match the wider TV aspect ratio, the game is presented in the same vertically oriented way as the original coin-op, with cartoony Pac-Man-related graphics framing it. This maintains the gameplay just as you may have remembered it from all those summer nights at the pizza parlor.